ai and ml
AI heavyweights warn their tech could help terrorists develop bioweapons
Scientists and industry leaders push for mandatory DNA synthesis screening
The world’s AI luminaries love to warn us of impending planetary demise thanks to their creations, and they’re back with a new warning: Rapidly improving frontier AI models, combined with readily available synthetic nucleic acids, could lower barriers to biological weapons development.The open letter, published this week, calls on lawmakers to make screening of orders for synthetic nucleic acids and the equipment used to produce them mandatory. It also backs recordkeeping for synthesis orders and sequence data so that potentially dangerous activity that slips through initial screening can be traced back to its source.As has been the case with previous open letters from AI heavyweights warning of extinction-level threats from the products they created, the letter was signed by a who’s-who of the industry. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, OpenAI chief Sam Altman, Anthropic boss Dario Amodei, Microsoft AI leader Mustafa Suleyman, and other notable names appear on the letter. Outside the AI sector, leaders from the life sciences and nucleic acid synthesis industries also signed the letter, warning that advances in AI and the growing availability of synthetic nucleic acids could pose biosecurity risks.
